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Mike Loukides on Java's Community License
jbc writes "Here's an
opinion piece from O'Reilly's web site titled
The
Chameleon and the Virus: More Thoughts on Java's Community
License. Gist: The viral, coercive GPL has retarded
acceptance of open source software. Java's more flexible
license can help bring more people into the movement. "
My DSL is broken since Tuesday morning, email won't work, all I have left is this really slow radio modem. Call me at my office phone 510-526-1165 if you want to talk.
O'Reilly's interested in what I guess we should call Corporate Source. Semi-proprietary applications that individuals can contribute to if they want, without a fair quid-pro-quo for secondary contributors. In this case the Chamelion license does not meet the OSD and should not be referred to as Open Source all. I guess ORA figures that Corporate Source will sell more books. For me as an individual developer, it does not offer a fair quid-pro-quo and I will continue to work on GPL and LGPL projects.
I was really glad to get the GTK+ book (Developing Linux Applications) from New Riders this week. It's nice that the world's largest publishing group is giving O'Reilly a run for their money. Laurie Petricki, their managing editor and a really nice person, is doing a good job of helping free software while O'Reilly deprecates it. Go New Riders!
Thanks
Bruce Perens
Bruce Perens.
Since it's the 2nd of April, I'm assuming that this is not yet another april fool's day slashdot news item
I've participated in a few opensource projects and helped code a few functional utlities that still helps a lot of people all around the world. When Netscape announced the release of Mozilla code, I was one of many to logon to their site and download the tar ball, but alas, it was too hard to decypher. I went through the code for 1 week (a lot longer than most people did). I couldnt figure out 75% of the things in there. So I gave up. (And I guess that is what happend to all the others out there)
Initially when netscape announced the release of mozilla, there were dozens of web sites, hundreds of mailing lists, just devoated to the discussion of what should be in mozilla. Over the past year, these web sites and lists just died away one by one. I guess what most people did not release was, that what mozilla needed was not new functionally, but... stablility, at a good speed. It did not need be a front end to your kitchen skin (should see some of the suggestions made on wishlists) it just needed to fetch a web page and display complying with most statndard as possible.
Then there are those who bitched about mozilla, from the start to the end (i guess when jwz leaves, it might as well be the end). I don't think bitching about the code would have helped making it more stable and fast. Helping the coders, coding it your self and replacing those netscape coders should have been the first thing we should have done. As jwz stated, most people thought netscape still owned mozilla and had full control over mozilla (this was inforced by the inital netscape/mozilla licence,) on that.. i belive mozilla would have been better accepted if it was released as BSD or GPL/LGPL.. most coders were weary of this and stayed away from mozilla just cause of that fact alone... and then there were those who, like me, waited for others to go ahead and do something to the code, test it, pinch it.. see if it bites.. (would a dead beast bite?)
Best jwz quote : I must say, though, that it feels good to be resigning from AOL instead of resigning from Netscape
--
As a counterpoint, the GPL was coercive for a reason. Look at the CDDB flap recently. The GPL's terms were coercive precisely to make it impossible for the equivalent to happen to GPLd software. That has a cost, but considering corporate attitudes it might not be as paranoid as all that after all. The Community license is more friendly towards commercial software, but it also allows for someone to benefit from openly-developed software without letting anyone else benefit from the results. There's a cost there just as there is with the GPL. The question is which is greater: the cost to the commercial develpers of the GPL, or the cost to the community of taking work derived from open-source code and making it proprietary.
My question is, what constitutes a "derivative"?
Is it only a derivative if I cut & paste the source from a GPL program into my own? This would seem silly since I could just compile the GPL code into a library and call the functions from my proprietary code.
Therefore, it seems to be a derivative if I am linking against a library with GPL'd code. If so, what if I just take the code that I want and compile it into a binary which listens on a socket for instructions from my proprietary code, and responds? I could re-release my modified "listener" under the GPL but still have a proprietary program reaping the benefits.
Therefore, it seems that it might even be a derivative if I use the functionality of the GPL'd code, without using the code itself.. In which case, if an OS was distributed under the GPL, wouldn't a program be considered a derivative even if it uses system calls? All of a sudden, the whole system must be distributed under the GPL.
Lets make things more complicated: assume I have two libraries which perform identically from an executable's point of view (i.e. Motif & LessTif), of which one is distributed under a proprietary license and the other under the GPL. I write a proprietary program and link it to Motif. I sell it to you. You don't have Motif, so you link it to LessTif and find it works flawlessly. Is my program now a "derivative" of LessTif? Does it now fall under the GPL? Can the user distribute the program under the GPL?
One thing to note: I don't know exactly how the GPL works - it might address these concerns. But even the fact that I don't know the answers to these questions (and probably few others do either) makes the GPL a very unattractive thing to get tangled up in.
The O'Reilly stance reminds me of Americans who think it should be illegal to burn the flag, failing to see that, because the flag itself symbolizes the freedom to burn it, enacting such a law would actually destroy what it was meant to protect.
To say the GPL is coercive, and ought to be superceded, is to say that open source is so important that we have to sacrifice a little bit of its essence in order to ensure its continued existence. It is to say, wrongly, that freedom is so important we must restrict ourselves from burning the flag.
I do agree with Loukides on one point, though. We should be using a carrot and not a stick. The hot rhetoric in the preamble to the GPL belies the fact that, by releasing GPLed software, you are doing something really nice. Why the FSF has chosen to characterize it in the opposite way -- that by NOT using the GPL you are somehow oppressing people -- is beyond me.